Identity Matters: Transnational Elites

Charles Murray's piece the other day on the emergence of a "new elite" in the United States makes some interesting if well-worn points. In my view the article has some pretty serious blind spots. I'm not sure how one can analyze the current American "aristocracy of merit" without looking at the intersection of skyrocketing inequality and the decline of institutions that promote class mobility. In general, the focus on the "new elite's" cultural and educational capital without seriously examining its economic position misses a colossal part of the picture, and ends up implying that structural shifts in the American socio-economic fabric are driven by quirks of cultural evolution and university admission policies, rather than by political economy. Also, readers can get a much more intelligent and nuanced (if less accessible) picture of some of the phenomena Murray identifies by reading Distinction. Just sayin'.

Referencing Murray's piece, Mark Kirkorian earned a Malkin nomination with the following paragraph:

...much of the New Elite does not, in fact, love America and is, in Murray’s phrasing, defective in its patriotism. Today’s elites — not just here, but in Europe as well — are increasingly post national. Murray writes that “the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities,” which is correct, but he doesn’t seem to get (or at least didn’t write) that these “comparatively small number of cities and in selected neighborhoods in those cities” are increasingly part of a distinct transnational community.

First off, the notion that there is any significant segment of the American elite that "does not, in fact, love America" is an absurd caricature. My own background is pretty close to Murray's description of the sheltered, isolated new elite. I'm white, from the northeast, grew up middle class, was educated at private schools, have left-wing-ish politics, no experience of poverty beyond grad school (which, as Murray notes, doesn't really count), and spend most of my time with people from basically similar backgrounds. I and pretty much every American I know, though, still manage to love this country very much. This left-wing-latte-sipping-commie-liberal-elite patriotism is necessarily informed by reflection on America's failings as well as its successes and its promise. It's different from the flag-waving, jingoist tribalism that some on the American right confuse for genuine patriotism; but, the argument that the majority of America's cultural elite have somehow transcended nationalism should sound ridiculous to anyone who actually spends time among this group.

The emergence of a "trans-national elite," though, is something worth thinking about in the longer term, especially in the European context. Benedict Anderson, author of one of the definitive studies of modern nationalism, emphasized the importance of the new communicative spheres brought on by print capitalism in the development of national communities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Subsequent case studies have noted the importance of the initial emergence of a literate, self-referential elite within proto-national communities. The coalescing of such groups was often a prerequisite to the eventual spread of nationalist feeling among populations at large. Recent years have seen a communications revolution of comparable significance to print capitalism (look no further than the comments section in Jeb's recent piece on Siberian nationalism for evidence of this), and it's not inconceivable that, in the context of nascent political integration, a multi-lingual, supra-national elite could eventually emerge on the European continent. Even in Europe, though, this hasn't yet happened. National identity remains an extraordinarily important part of most people's self-image, and I see no evidence that it will be meaningfully eclipsed, even among elites, except over a very long period of time.

Again, if one takes an immensely caricatured version of what "patriotism" means, imagining it as an all-consuming, totalizing, un-critical attachment to one's country and government, then Kirkorian has a point. Under the circumstances, though, Kirkorian's argument reveals more about his own political psychology than it does about the subjects of his critique.

Krauthammer and "Scientific" Political Analysis

Charles Krauthammer earned his undergraduate degree in political science and economics at my alma mater, McGill. If his column today is any indication, he must not remember his time there very well.

Putting aside the usual disingenuous sophistry that's a hallmark of Krauthammer's columns, his piece today seems almost willfully ignorant of the last half-century's work connecting material economic conditions with electoral outcomes. For those who'd like to be spared the whole column, Krauthammer argues that Obama's recent attempt to explain the Democrats' upcoming thumpin' in the midterms reflects an effort to impose a 'liberal psychological narrative' on the American people. Obama, in Krauthammer's view, is excusing his party's losses by constructinng a narrative in which "an entire population is so addled by its economic anxieties as to be neurologically incapable of appreciating the "facts and science" undergirding Obamacare and the other blessings their president has bestowed upon them from on high." Rather than this convoluted bit of psychology, Krauthammer suggests that Obama's problem is that he's "tried to impose a liberal agenda on... a demonstrably center-right country," and is facing the backlash.

Once again I'm left wondering wistfully what the daily news would look like were it covered by political scientists. Anyone having even a passing familiarity with American politics literature (and as someone with more of a comparative/IR focus, my own familiarity is indeed passing) knows there is precisely one reason the Democrats are going to get punished in a couple of weeks: the economy. Incumbents get punished when the economy is bad. The economy right now is really bad, so incumbents are going to get punished especially harshly. That's really the only story here (well, if you read Bartels, it's slightly more complex - it's the direction of the country's economic health that counts). Hans Noel's excellent recent article "Ten Things Political Scientists Know That You Don't" adds some more context. The United States isn't a "center right" nation, because most people aren't particularly ideological one way or another. In addition, for all of Krauthammer's harping about the importance of independents, there's really no such thing. The vast majority of self-identified "independents" lean strongly one way or another, though they might be more inclined than strong partisans to punish the incumbent party for a poor economy.

Obama's "psychological" narrative might be a bit off in the sense that narrative in general just isn't what drives electoral outcomes except at the margins. Krauthammer's self-satisfied platitudes about how America is just a conservative place, though, are equally misguided. As someone with a background in political science, he ought to know better.

Update: Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that the Obama Administration and the Democrats are just prisoners of circumstance here. Government policy does actually have a measurable effect on economic performance, and if the Administration had taken this to heart, they could have set themselves up for, at the very least, a much less serious defeat. Listening to the people who were telling them to pass a much larger, more employment-focused stimulus back in 2009 would have been a good start. By the time the 2010 campaign season rolled around, though, the basic course of events was locked in. Actual campaigning, and the creation of narratives that stick in the public mind still matters, but it matters at the margins.

Climate Change and Systemic Volatility

Via Sullivan, this map has been circulating around the blogosphere for a few days now. It estimates the overall vulnerability of certain regions to the effects of climate change. Light green is low risk, dark blue is high risk:
There are a few obvious reactions here. One is to note how many of the worlds major emitters of greenhouse gas (so far) are in the "low risk" zone, proving definitively that mother nature has no sense of justice. Another good point is made by Yglesias, who notes that despite reasonably direct lines of causation (greenhouse emissions cause climate shifts which further immiserate already-desperately-poor farmers in already-desperately-poor parts of the world), "free market" boosters seem willfully blind to the negative externalities of polluting behavior; morally this is very weird.

Good points to be sure. What struck me about this chart, though, is the amount of blue in two of the world's emerging great powers (China and India). The next three to four decades seem likely to witness challenges to the political status quo by at least two rising powers just as those nations are experiencing extreme domestic socio-economic volatility caused by the compounding effects of climate change. To me, this is extremely worrying, because it means that the ruling regimes of those nations will be under intense domestic pressure, leading to potentially volatile and risky foreign policy behavior in order to either preserve domestic unity or seek the resources and geostrategic position to mitigate internal difficulties. Doesn't bode well for those who hope for those states to rise in non-disruptive ways.

Defense Spending, NATO and Europe's Relevance

The big news from across the pond over the past few days is the drastic cuts in public expenditure, including defense expenditure, being implemented in Britain. Via Yglesias, Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian outlines the scope of Britain's defense cuts, noting that they will lead to a measurably reduced expeditionary capacity, and making the kinds of operations we've seen the British launch in Iraq and Afghanistan all but impossible in the future. He also notes that Britain will probably now lack the capacity to lauch a Falklands-style overseas invasion.

In the face of severe fiscal crises, governments across Europe are cutting their defense budgets, but this transformation in particular might actually have a measurable effect on American policy and capabilities. The fact that Britain has maintained a reasonably substantial expeditionary capability in its post-imperial era has been a boon to America's global military architecture, a boon that is now disappearing. Aside from the significance to Britain (as Yglesias notes, the Brits might be better off axing their nuclear deterrent and keeping the ability to project conventional power, but I doubt domestic political concerns would allow such a thing) to me this news puts yet another nail in the coffin of NATO as a relevant military alliance, or indeed a particularly important organization in general.

In the wake of the Cold War, NATO's raison d'être - protecting Europe from a Soviet invasion or nuclear strike - was rendered largely moot. During the 1990s and into the 2000s, many envisioned the alliance becoming more globally assertive, undertaking humanitarian, peacekeeping and more traditionally offensive operations around the world. This probably wasn't ever sustainable, as it was a vision predicated on an absolute and enduring convergence of European and American interests. For what it's worth, I actually think there's far less daylight between those interests than some commonly posit, but at the end of the day it's hard to convince European populations to fork over blood and treasure to assist in what are viewed as fundamentally American projects.

The fact that European nations are now facing a budget squeeze, and that they're reducing what are essentially superfluous defense capabilities, merely serves to quicken the pace of NATO's slide away from strategic relevance. Europe simply isn't a particularly relevant place in military terms, either as an imperial center or as potentially contested strategic ground. This is, it should be remembered, a good thing, even if its consequences make American adventurism marginally more difficult.

The one other conclusion I draw from this is that, if European states want to be relevant across the geopolitical spectrum of the twenty-first century, the continued consolidation of sovereignty and the creation of something like a unified security policy, complete with a strategic vision and a relatively unified military architecture to carry it out, seems quite necessary. It also seems quite hard to create. Only time will tell if the abyss of military-strategic irrelevance will prove to be an effective political adhesive in the manner of the Soviet threat before it. I'm somewhat skeptical, but happy to be proven wrong.

Negotiating with Thugs: Thoughts on Engaging the Taliban

Helena Cobban makes an interesting observation:

So here are Sec. of State Hillary Clinton and SecDef Bob Gates now saying they support-- and are giving active support to-- the Afghan government's initiative to negotiate with the Taliban. But the U.S. government continues to completely oppose any attempt by any parties, Palestinian or other, to reach out and deal with the Hamas government that, lest we forget, was democratically elected in Palestine in January 2006.

A confusing policy, it's true. Why does the Obama administration support negotiations with those who took power by force and are connected to the 9/11 attacks, but reject negotiations with those who were legitimately elected (in January 2006) and have not attacked the US directly?

I've made this argument here before: I strongly believe that channels for discussion should always be left open, not used as a stick to punish opponents. While dialogue may not always lead to a solution, closing the door on dialogue will almost certainly not produce a better result. Just think of how ineffective the Bush administration's efforts were to isolate Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela. By failing to engage with them, Washington had little leverage with which to influence their policies, check their involvement in neighboring countries, discourage their nuclear ambitions, etc. In the case of North Korea and Iran, for example, years of non-engagement left both countries with almost free reign to pursue aggressive nuclear programs. And now look where they are today.

In contrast, consider the effect of our increased engagement with Russia. As I've noted before in the context of Georgia, engagement often brings newfound leverage; it can also create new avenues for cooperation. The US is not in such a unipolar position in the world that the mere assertion of our unwillingness to negotiate is a sufficient stick to discourage certain types of behaviors. Of course, engagement doesn't always work and there are plenty of times in history when negotiations have not served our interests because of how poorly they were conducted (Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961 comes to mind). But that's not an excuse not to talk; negotiations can be done strategically and in a way that bolster, not undermine, our interests.

In the case of the Taliban, channels of dialogue should continue to be opened. That said, I tend to agree with more pessimistic assessments of what these discussions might accomplish. The Taliban is in a position of strength; they have access to the news and know what's happening in Washington. Whereas Obama, day by day, is under increasing pressure to withdraw American forces, the Taliban have the benefit of time. Why should they give concessions to an Afghan government who, in just months from now, will be in a much weaker position?

Max Boot, in an interview published on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the kind of argument that strikes me as highly dangerous: that if we only commit more troops, hit them harder, show the Taliban we're never going to leave, that Taliban leaders will be more likely to cede ground (bad pun, yes) during negotiations with the Kabul government. This is almost certainly wrong. Even if Obama decided to extend our involvement in Afghanistan past July of next year, the Taliban still understand that our occupation cannot last far beyond that. Indeed, his is the exact same kind of argumentation that prolonged the war in Vietnam. When Kissinger took over as National Security Advisor in 1969, he decided that peace offers from the North Vietnamese were not favorable enough because the US was not in a clear position of strength vis-a-vis Hanoi. The subsequent increase in air strikes, typified by the famous Christmas Day Bombing in late 1972, was designed to put the US back in a position of strength. Well, it didn't work. South Vietnam was still overrun and, in the meantime, tens of thousands of US troops had died.

Like the North Vietnamese, the Taliban can just wait us out. And there is every indication that they are doing just that. But while I am overwhelmingly pessimistic that dialogue with the Taliban will accomplish much, there is little reason not to keep diplomatic avenues open. There's always a chance that something will come of them.

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Quick Hit: Currency

While I agree with Atrios that this statement by Geithner might send a mixed message, it's worth noting that the dollar floats, the renminbi doesn't. Unless my understanding is seriously flawed, the Chinese government has been depressing the value of its currency (at the expense of its citizens' living standards) for some time. What the U.S. wants is for that manipulation to stop, or at least to ease up a bit. So this doesn't seem quite like a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

Quick Hit: Self-Determination

Jeb's post this weekend on Siberian nationalism highlighted the broader problem of ethnic minorities and the practical issues raised by their purported right to secede from existing states. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a pretty good summary of the practical and ethical issues involved. Like the author I tend to lean toward a "remedial right only" view of the question, but the international legal questions involved in implementing such a regime remain murky.

Siberian Self-Determination?

First off, I want to apologize about my MIA status for the last little while. A slew of apps and an unexpected work load has kept me away from this blog. Jumping right back in, the report that grabbed my attention this afternoon is Paul Goble's post on the blooming nationalist aspirations of...the Siberians. Yup, it's true.

Siberian nationalists, encouraged by the response to their call for residents of that enormous region to declare themselves Siberian by nationality in the upcoming Russian Federation census, have now issued an appeal to the broader international community about what they see as the coming of age of the Siberian nation. The 400-word appeal, which was posted online yesterday in both Siberian/Russian and English, argues that the willingness of people there to declare their nationality as Siberian marks “the end of the ripening and forming of Siberian identity” and thus the coming into existence of a Siberian nation...

This story provides another indication about how thorny this issue of ethnic self-determination is becoming. If the right of ethnic groups to self-autonomy is encouraged and legitimatized by international actors (see the recent Kosovo example), then where's it ever to stop? Russia, ethnically diverse as it is, is in a particularly difficult position and one can understand why Moscow has been less than supportive of such movements. If the Siberians want self-determination, then what about all the hundreds of other ethnic groups that live within Russia's borders as well?

Consider the numbers. According to its 2002 census, Russia has over 150 ethnic groups. But we know that these numbers are understated and politicized (as they were historically during the Soviet era), given that there are many more groupings who recognize themselves but remain officially unrecognized by Moscow. One can imagine a scenario in which more and more ethnic groups become disillusioned with the failings of the Russian government, feel marginalized within their own communities, and are inspired by an eloquent leader to assert their own ethnic identities by violently forming autonomous nations of their own. It's a frightening prospect.

As Donald Horowitz famously argued in his piece, The Cracked Foundation of the Right to Secede, "propounding a right to secede... is likely to increase ultimately fruitless secessionist warfare, at the expense of internal efforts at political accommodation and at the cost of increased human suffering." In other words, as long as a principle exists that legitimizes a right of ethnic groups to stake out their own claims to self-determination, there is little end in sight to ethnic conflict. Who, after the Siberians, will be next to demand their own autonomy? I can think of quite a few candidates.

"Strategy" and the E.U.

Judah Grunstein comments that we shouldn't be too hasty to dismiss the E.U. as a "strategic actor" despite how dysfunctional the organization often seems in areas of international affairs. Judah notes that:

...the EU has begun to wake up... to the fact that, even without hard power in the form of force projection, there are ways of wielding the soft power it does possess in a "harder" way. And if it manages to figure out how to do that in a coherent way, there's no reason why the union can't establish itself as a credible strategic actor whose interests, rather than its moral judgment, need to be taken seriously.

It's a good piece and worth a read. I think there's a link here to Yglesias's observation that the definition of what counts as "strategic" probably needs to change to better reflect a 21st century world. For most of history, "strategic" questions have been military questions. Militaries were necessary to protect and sustain mercantalist economic relationships, and were the principal means that highly-militarized early-modern and modern states projected power.

Now, though, questions of climate change, or of combatting piracy, or of global trade regimes, almost certainly merit the label "strategic," at least in some cases. On security questions, meanwhile, Europe has few major threats to worry about. This probably bodes well for the E.U., since a coherent security policy is one of the last elements of sovereignty that the states constituting the union are likely to relinquish. A world in which E.U. power can be projected in non-military, but still very effective and even "hard" ways is a world in which the E.U. will be able to act with comparative unity and coherence.

Again on Self-Awareness

I wasn't expecting a great deal of intellectual nuance when I started to read Rupert Murdoch's recent address to the ADL, so I wasn't overly disappointed by the logical inconsistencies, or by his equating of criticism of Israeli policy with the waves of conventional and terrorist violence against Israel that have taken place over the past half-century. For all his overreaching, though, Murdoch did evince a fairly sophisticated understanding of the subtlety with which anti-semitic sentiment still permeates contemporary discourse. He pointed out the following recent remarks made by EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht:

There is indeed a belief—it’s difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews
or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.

Murdoch goes on to comment:

This minister did not suggest the problem was any specific Israeli policy. The problem, as he defined it, is the nature of the Jews. Adding to the absurdity, this man then responded to his critics this way: Anti-Semitism, he asserted, “has no place in today’s world and is fundamentally against our European values.”

Of course, he has kept his job.

Murdoch is entirely right to point out the poisonous nature of such statements, which project a stubborn unwillingness to reevaluate ideas onto an entire group of people, based just on their religion and ancestry. Clearly, non-Jews are never stubborn and never believe themselves to be right.

This principle doesn't apply solely to anti-semitic discourse, though, and Murdoch oversees a corporate media empire that routinely gives platforms (and in some cases outright support) to some of the worst Islamophobic bigots out there. Most of these people still have their jobs too.

Identity Matters: Recognition of a Jewish State

Michael Oren has an op-ed in the Times today calling for Palestinian recognition of the Jewish character of the Israeli state. Diplomatic boilerplate for the most part, complete with slipshod logic and sophistic rhetorical flourishes, but worth a read if only as an example of decent PR work. This whole issue seems like no more than another roadblock/blame-shifting strategy by Netanyahu, and I wouldn't expect the Palestinian leadership to take it particularly seriously. Like Yglesias, I think that if Israel were serious about negotiating a settlement with the PA it wouldn't keep hunting for new excuses to avoid brass tacks. Legitimacy is one of the few things that Israel actually wants from the Palestinians, and to expect them to make concessions to that effect as a precondition for talks makes little sense.

That said, it's worth pointing out again that, from the perspective of Israeli nationalists, demanding recognition of Israel's Jewish character from Palestinians external to Green Line Israel is really quite stupid. Regardless of what, if any, accord is ever reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, twenty percent of Israeli citizens are of Palestinian ethnicity. Their status in an explicitly Jewish state seems likely to be an issue of serious political contention at some future point, and if I were an Israeli nationalist I wouldn't want to have invited the broader Palestinian community into the debate. It seems clear that more short term considerations are at work at the moment, but in the long run, taking this stance seems like a poor strategic choice.

Institutional Prerogative, Terrorism and the Liberal State

One of the more interesting debates in the blogosphere in recent days has been between Glenn Greenwald (always provocative) and Andrew Sullivan over the legitimacy of the Obama Administration's program to assassinate American citizens abroad without the protections of due process. As Steve Walt notes in his comments, both authors are civil (if spirited) and present their cases in a fairly intellectually honest way. I don't go quite as far as Walt in admitting that my views "shifted back and forth" as I read the Greenwald and Sullivan pieces - at the end of the day the notion that the President of the United States has the legal right to assassinate American citizens without judicial oversight, or indeed any oversight beyond his own judgment, strikes me as anathama to the very idea of constitutional government. If the executive has the right to kill his fellow citizens at will, then I'm at a loss to think of actions that would be legally beyond his authority. That's the very essence of tyrrany.

Still, to say that Sullivan is wrong on balance is not to suggest that he doesn't make some decent points, and their larger implications actually get to far more basic questions of the future of the liberal state, as well as the compatibility of (domestic) liberal governance with assertive/imperialist behavior abroad. While I'd recommend reading the pieces, they boil down to a fundamental difference of opinion over the duties and limits of the executive, the nature of the threat posed by international terrorism, and the modern applicability of the concepts of war and peace.

For Greenwald, the notion that the executive branch, without submitting to the oversight authority of any other legal body, can simply decide that an American citizen is in a state of war with the United States, and then use that status to kill him irrespective of circumstances (he could be firing a Kalashnikov at American soldiers, or he could be eating dinner with his family), must necessarily invalidate any meaningful restriction on executive actions. In theory, under this doctrine, the executive could decide that I'm at war with the United States, then put me on a hit list and have me killed. No other body would be able to prevent this from happening, neither could one even demand the evidence justifying the killing (state secrets). If three hundred years of work circumscribing the power of the state to create a government of laws and not of men can be tossed aside because of a few militants who wish Americans ill, what does that say about the viability of the liberal project?

For Sullivan, Greenwald and his supporters pay far too little attention to the fact that, to quote his post's title, "yes, we are at war." A confluence of modern communications technology, modern kinetic and explosive technology, and the immense destruction that a fairly small group of people can wreak with a combination of the two, must lead to an expansion of the concept of "war" to include fights with stateless terrorists and militants that have both the desire and the capacity to kill Americans in fairly large numbers. To imagine that wars against such groups, the leaders of which frequently cross borders and base their operations in the midst of civilian communities, can be fought without basically abandoning the concept of a "battlefield" as a geographically-limited space is naive, and would unduly hobble state agents in their pursuit of such people.

Liberal states - and here I'm using "liberal" in the expansive sense - have since their inception faced interrelated challenges from two different directions. One has been external - other states, groups or ideological movements have presented alternatives to the liberal model of governance, at times backed with considerable firepower. The other has been internal - those very same threats create political space for existing state institutions to expand their power, escape meaningful oversight and ignore or downplay individual rights. American history provides numerous examples. The quasi-war with France produced the Alien and Sedition acts, later allowed to expire by those uncomfortable with their overreaching. World War I saw a massive expansion in the coercive power of government, a power that was only selectively curtailed during the inter-war years (the first Red Scares of the 1920s didn't help), only to mushroom to new levels of institutional strength during and after World War II (the second wave of Red Scares during the 1950s didn't help either). The restrictions put on executive power during the post-Nixon years have now in large measure been superseded or circumvented (even Nixon didn't assert a right to unilaterally kill American citizens), and since 9/11 the institutional weight of the American military and intelligence apparatus has become absolutely staggering.

Leaving aside for a moment whether the current institutional architecture of the American counter-terrorism apparatus is equal to the task, the larger question is whether, in the context of a modern, highly intrusive, highly coercive state, liberal restrictions on governance are truly sustainable. Institutional leaders nearly always seek to increase the power, resources and independence of their institutions. The Washington Post estimates that there are currently 1,271 government organizations (and at least as many private ones) involved in counter-terrorism and intelligence activities. At the same time, the fact that they're dealing with an extremely amorphous, secretive and ill-understood (if, as Sullivan reminds us, quite real) threat has the potential to create ever-more political space for those institutions to expand their power and shake off the chains of what little oversight they remain subject to. The current attempt by the executive to almost completely decouple himself from legal or political scrutiny in matters of counter-terrorism (again, if the President can kill American citizens at will...) is in many ways the next logical step in a long-term trend.

All of this is extremely worrying, precisely because it doesn't seem to matter that much who is in power. Some Presidents enthusiastically enable the expansion of executive power, others do so with more subtlety, but the overall trend line seems only to move in one direction, even with a professor of Constitutional law sitting in the Oval Office. It makes me genuinely concerned for the future of law-based governance, here or anyplace else.

Jones's Resignation

So apparently General James Jones is resigning as National Security Advisor, to be replaced by Deputy NSA Tom Donilon. I have no significant insight into either person, though I did find amusing the immediate clarification to Politico (who else?) that, no, there's no problem between Donilon and Bob Gates, what ever would have given people that idea? Also, how has it become a rule in Washington that Bob Woodward gets to have (manipulated and selective) inside access to every administration for a couple of books per term? Is there some kind of standing agreement with the executive branch?

Anyway, if the court gossip about the reasons for the supposed Gates-Donilon tensions are true, I suppose it would be some cause for concern (shooting off half-cocked opinions isn't a trait I'd want in an NSA). That said, if the Caucus's initial take is actually representative of Donilon's priorities (a lower footprint in the Middle East, less emphasis on Europe, and more attention to the American security position in Asia), then I suppose I welcome the switch. I also think American over-investment in the Middle East is structurally overdetermined, so I'd expect something like a staff shake-up to help only at the margins, if at all. Still, given the comparatively unimaginative way in which the Obama team has conducted foreign and security policy so far, putting some different ideas at the forefront can't hurt.

Clinton-Biden Swap?

I'm assuming that Bob Woodward's speculation about a Hillary Clinton-Joe Biden role reversal is mostly about Bob Woodward wanting to generate buzz for himself. Possibly it's also a trial baloon being floated by the White House, complete with the requisite denials. I doubt anything will come of it.

For the record, though, I'd be perfectly happy with the switch. I was always a bit puzzled (and not entirely satisfied) with the pick of Hillary Clinton for State, mostly because foreign policy was one of the few areas of substantive disagreement between Clinton and Obama during the campaign, and I liked Obama's approach better. I also like Biden on foreign policy issues - a feeling that was reinforced by press rumors that he opposed the Afghanistan escalation last year (full disclosure, I very briefly interned for Biden while he was in the Senate). All things being equal, then, it's actually a decision I'd support on the merits. Again, I'm assuming this is more flash-in-the-pan rumor than serious possibility, and that were it to happen it would be for domestic electoral reasons, not policy ones, but politics aside it might be a decent idea.

The Military and Renewable Energy

One of the lead Times stories this morning concerns the efforts of the U.S. military - spurred on by extraordinary logistical difficulties posed by the remote and energy-resource-poor battlefields of Afghanistan - to rapidly integrate renewable energy sources into its operations. Assuming the sea change being talked about here has some reasonable relationship with reality, then this is great. As the article notes, the market power of the Pentagon is staggering, and a rapid increase in military demand for renewable energy technologies could spur the kind of investment in such advances that's been so sorely lacking in this country.

Admittedly, this leaves me somewhat ambivalent. As a general rule, I wish it were easier to engage in major public policy initiatives and invest in important research without having to find some military justification for doing so. The kinds of investments in clean energy that will be necessary to transform the American energy economy could probably be more efficiently made in a civilian context, and a country with a healthy political culture would make them on their own merits. That said, to the extent that the Pentagon is able to induce an end run around energy politics that have become caught up in issues of identity as much as economics (real Americans burn fossil fuels dammit), I suppose I'll take the help from whence it's coming.

Update: When I talk about my discomfort with vesting the military with too much power in what ought to be civilian domains, this is why.

Slapstick Politics

Bolivian President Evo Morales apparently kneed an opponent in the groin in retaliation for a rough tackle during a soccer match. No comment necessary.

Seulement les Français...

I'm preparing a much longer post addressing this debate, but I'd just like to point out that only the French would have a color coded terror alert system that separates "reinforced red" from the highest level, "scarlet."

Terrorism is a Banal Threat to Public Safety

Matt Yglesias posted an interesting thought about counter-terrorism resources yesterday:

According to my calculation, if we were to cut America’s $663.8 billion defense budget by 1%, that would free up enough funds to double the budget of the FBI. Doesn’t it seem like that would probably, on net, reduce the risk of Americans dying in a terrorist attack? And in the meantime we might catch some more bank robbers or other banal threats to public safety.

Decent point to be sure. The last sentence, though, gets to a slight pet peeve of mine when it comes to discourse about terrorism (and this isn't directed at Matt, who I suspect is being at least slightly ironic). Terrorism is a banal threat to public safety. Webster defines "banal" as "lacking in originality, freshness or novelty." Certainly some innovations in the tactics and practice of terrorism have appeared over the years. Suicide terrorism, at least in the modern context, is a reasonably recent phenomenon depending on how one defines one's terms, and certainly there are new groups and causes that have become associated with terrorist activity. It's really worth remembering, though, that societies have been dealing with what we would generally recogninze as terrorism since the beginning of the industrial age. David Rapoport has identified four separate "waves" of modern terrorism stretching back to the nineteenth century.

We expect governments to do what they can, within the limits necessary to afford meaningful freedom to their citizens, to protect those in their jurisdiction from harm. To protect citizens against violent harm is obviously a particular imperative, and political violence tends to get state leaders in a particular tizzy, as it represents the most fundamental challenge to a state's monopoly of violence and of political activity. Still, our politics would almost certainly be healthier if people had an easier time putting the threat of terrorism in some reasonable context, recognizing it's but one threat to public health and safety, and by no means the most serious one.

Cyberwarfare and Sir Francis Drake

Yesterday, the Times had a story about how the Stuxnet worm, a piece of malware designed to attack a particular kind of industrial control computer used at Iran's nuclear facilities (in addition to those of a number of other countries) might contain a biblical reference to the book of Esther and the pre-emptive foiling of a Persian plot. Nobody said hackers/intelligence types have no sense of humor.

Putting aside questions of authorship for a moment, though, the article got me thinking about potential historical parallels to the emerging phenomenon of cyber attacks like this. There have been a number of instances in recent years in which international tensions have found expression - intentional or not - in campaigns of electronic disruption and harassment. It seems to me that an interesting parallel can be found in the era of New World piracy/privateering in the 16th and 17th centuries. Both phenomena - peacetime cyber attacks and piracy - give states the ability to, in a sense, poke each other with a stick. They can harass, annoy and disrupt a state's operations and slow its attainment of political or economic goals without providing sufficient strategic imperative for a stronger, more direct response from the target state. As today's article underlines, they also leave murky trails of responsibility, and the risk that a particular cyber attack will be definitively traced to a particular government is quite low, especially if intelligence agencies act through private proxies. As the article points out, murky lines of authority make cyber deterrence quite difficult (also like the 'peacetime' piracy/privateering of an earlier era), and I wouldn't be surprised to see this kind of behavior, lying as it does on the borders of state policy, economic opportunism and criminality, increase sharply in the near future.

This is not to deny that this kind of behavior has drawbacks for its perpetrators. Also like early moder piracy, when privateers recruited during war came back to haunt their erstwhile paymasters in peace, I imagine the danger of "blowback" associated with this kind of activity will increase along with its frequency. Putting state resources into the hands of semi-affiliated actors with their own motives and goals is sure to have unintended consequences. It should also be remembered that piracy did on occasion lead to more serious escalations of hostilities (there was that whole Spanish Armada thing), and that an unstable deterrence regime may make state responses to particularly serious cyber threats unpredictable.

Something to keep a weather eye on.

Message to Muslims

Another gem by Kristof.